A Few Hundred Partner Spaces

Last week, ARM IT ran the software migration of the company directory. You might have noticed the appearance of ~750 more spaces. Monday was the start of the reformatting of these spaces to make them coherent with the rest of the community.

Please don't try to engage with "xxxadmin" usernames as they are most likely unattended and created during the migration process.

Why I Think a Community is Different From a Standard Website?

This is something I last discussed with Sylvie and we thought it might be useful to share it to a wider audience.

Influence

A community is more about influencing. Here, you cannot (shouldn't) push your content to members "inbox" like with a newsletter. However, as you contribute pertinent content, people will follow you… and then will receive your updates in their inbox!

In a nutshell you need to earn access.

Content Discovery

I foresee content being discovered by association/proxy. The way you ask for a restaurant recommendation in real life is by asking people you know have similar taste to yours.

It will work the same way and let's take an example. As Hazel contribute in the community, let's say that Bob will read a couple of Hazel's posts and then will decide that he likes what Hazel posts… so Bob follows Hazel. Then Hazel sees what Sylvie posted in STMicroelectronics and comments/likes/bookmarks… As Bob follows Hazel, Bob will see that Hazel commented Sylvie's post and Bob will go and read Sylvie's post. Bob didn't even hear about Sylvie before but if he likes what he sees, Bob will then like the content further spreading the content to his subscribers.

As the community grows it will be difficult for someone to read all the content, so they let everyone else do the job for them, they rely on their network!

People

In the community, people are important because people put the information into perspective. On a traditional website, the content is impersonal, it is the corporate message. On a community, you have a personal approach. People will like the person and not only the content itself. But they also look at people with similar profile to theirs. Reusing my restaurant analogy, if there are two reviews, one good and one bad. Unless I know one of them has similar taste to mine, these reviews are no use to me.What is interesting to a hardware person working with microcontrollers is not necessarily pertinent to an engineer working on ARM servers.